AGAINST SCHOOL AS PRESENTLY CONSTITUTED
 by Mary Leue
 

There is a technical high school in Turner's Falls, in western Massachusetts, which has a cooking program (among a wide variety of training options) that teaches kids how to buy, prepare and serve lunch on weekdays to whoever comes in to eat - and also offers a display of bakery goods to be purchased - in a restaurant setting, and at a moderate price. It is very popular. I have driven over there for lunch on a number of occasions. It's a very good experience. Except for the ones cooking and serving the food, the kids are free at lunchtime and just get to hang out with each other. Around Christmastime, many of them have tables set up in the hallways at which they sell various goods made in their classes.

 
I can only characterize the whole feeling tone of this big bunch of kids as downright unAmerican - at least if compared with most high school groups under the same circumstances. No teachers monitoring, no kids teasing each other, no excessive flirting or harassing, no frenetic dashing about, no smoking in sheltered corners outside the building - just kids strolling about in small groups, chatting with each other or selling their products, those from the greenhousing group offering sturdy plants - and being very knowledgeable about their management - along the corridor, some studying in a sunny corner - well, you get the picture. These kids love what they're doing, and they are good at what they do!
 
My sons tell me there is an equally good tech school in Northampton - and there must be lots of them in many Massachusetts towns and cities. I sure hope so. My youngest son tells me they plan to encourage their youngest son to go to the school in Hamp.
 
Having founded, co-led and taught at an inner city alternative school (The Albany Free School - preschool through grade 9) from 1969 until my retirement in 1985, I feel as though I have a pretty good eye and ear for kids who are both enjoying what they do and doing a heck of a good job doing it! It's as though through some miracle none of these kids are subject to the ills cited as typical teenage behaviors. Well, it's NOT a miracle. It's just what happens whn kids are allowed to do what they want to do.
 
It seems to me that a big part of our destructive racism as a people is mainly a subset of our basic class prejudice problem, both urban anbd rural - which is actually less ubiquitous than it was when I was a kid in the 20s and 30s, as I remember the universal discrimination practiced against working class culture during my own adolescence. I have a friend who taught for thirty years in a small rural high school in an ex-logging town in central Maine. He has detailed the horrifying prejudice - even in the 80s - to which local kids whose parents came from poverty groups have been exposed during their high school years (click on the title, SCHOOLING FOR HUMANITY .- When Big Brother Isn't Watching, by David O. Solmitz, to read a back cover comment, and here for an excerpt). This is a scene I believe is being endlessly repeated in most urban high schools in poverty areas of the cities.
 
But the crazy emphasis we seem obsessively bent on through programs like "No Child Left Behind" offer a model of life based on upward mobility and four years of college as a foundation for some high-paying corporate job - and such a model seems to me badly self-defeating. It fails to take into account the fact that many, perhaps most, members of the working class are treated so badly because they do not, or cannot, fit the middle class ideal that they either drop out or fail miserably!
 
I have five kids, all married, with careers and kids of their own. Two of them pursued the traditional course into four-year liberal arts colleges - both of them Cornell, actually.
 
It took my oldest son his four years of undergraduate study at Cornell, switching majors from engineering to liberal arts, then deciding to drop out, spending two years pumping gas at a local gas station, then four years rebuilding transmissions at a VW garage, then completion of his undergraduate years at SUNY Albany, a third major in econometrics, a Lehman Fellowship in that field, then, during the Vietnam War, serving in alternative service in math at a boys' treatment school as a conscientious objector, finally landing where he really felt fine, taking the training in computer programming offered at the Computer Center at SUNY Albany. He landed a wonderful job at GE's medical tomology division, where he became team leader for the CAT-scan, the MRI and the system based on ultrasound (whatever its name) and has felt fully rewarded throughout the years since that time for the application of his skills. Sadly, in spite of this happy ending, he might have been spared a lot of self-doubt, boredom and even depression over the years it took him to find himself if there had been more options early on!

The other, my daughter, majored in horticulture, the career she had clearly in her sights, and went on from there into plant breeding, where she has made a very successful career! The other three chose more alternative programs - one Rochester Institute of Technology, where he went through the School for American Craftsmen, an excellent choice which prepared him for his highly creative work as a designer working mostly in wood! - the second, Antioch College, with a major in ecology - whose work-study program introduced him to a wide variety of programs demanding both skills and stamina! - and the third graduating from an alternative high school he helped design himself, moving from there to a self-chosen school for training in the building of stringed instruments - excellent preparation for a lifelong career as a highly-skilled luthier.

 
My grandkids (12) have mostly made it into the ranks of the standard "preppie" group, but none of them was prepared for what they ended up doing by their "higher education." One of them segued into a four-year college where she quickly found recognition for the skills she had been honing in her secondary "prep" school as lighting director for the school's outstanding drama program, and went right on to the Yale School of the Drama, and from there intol a lucrative job in her field! So she was able to parlay her own natural bent, which was considered a sideline, not the main program, by her school, into a satisfying career. Three other grandkids have had to make it through the four-year programs of their chosen colleges and find jobs ill-suited to their preparations while allowing them to become independent of their parents. They might have been off and running a lot sooner, and more of them might have found careers based on their natural, trainable skills rather than simply having to find jobs working for other people, subject to the vagaries of their employment, if they had had some sort of self-chosen central skill-training to begin with. After all, the rest can always be added as time goes along, if one feels educationally malnourished. My youngest son has been adding to his own educational scope ever since the year (1979) he graduated from his self-organized high school. People, after all, are not like domesticated turkey poults, who starve if not taught soon after they hatch to peck at chickfeed by having marbles dropped into in their troughs - their natural instincts in the wild having been by-passed by captivity!
 
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